27 
misunderstood, may be gathered from certain events re- 
corded in the History of Nennius, Baeda's Life of St. Cuth- 
bert, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is possible to fix 
the date and the circumstances of the conquest of Southern 
Lancashire with considerable accuracy, and to make out the 
latest possible time at which any part of the county was 
under Welsh, and not English rule, or in other words, was 
within the boundary of Wales and not of England. To exa- 
mine these points properly we must see what relation 
existed between the English on the one hand and the Brit- 
Welsh on the other. 
In the year 449, the three ships which contained Hengist 
and his warriors landed at Ebbsfleet in Thanet, and the first 
English colony was founded among the descendants of the 
Homan provincials, who were known to the strangers as 
Brit- Welsh. From that time a steady immigration of 
Angle, Jute, and Frisian set in towards our eastern coast, 
as far north as the Firth of Forth, until in the first 
half of the 6th century the whole of the eastern part 
of our island was occupied by various tribes, whose 
names for the most part still survive in the names of 
our counties. The principal rivers also offered them a free 
passage into the heart of the country, and the kingdom of 
Mercia gradually expanded from the banks of the Trent 
until it reached as far as the line of the Severn. The river 
Humber afforded a base of operations for the Anglian free- 
booters who founded the kingdom of Deira, or modern 
Yorkshire, while the rock of Bamborough was the centre 
from which Ida, who landed with 50 ships in the year 547 ? 
conquered Bernicia, or the region extending from the river 
Tees to Edinburgh. The tide of English colonization rolled 
steadily westward until at the close of the 6th century the 
Pennine chain, or the stretch of hills, heath, and forest ex- 
tending southwards from Cumberland and Westmoreland, 
through Yorkshire and Derbyshire, as far as the line of the 
